'Sending out an SOS' - quote Sting.
The official poster for the movie is out and it looks to be a close up of a bottle at sea? Message in a bottle then? Paul Thomas Anderson, the acclaimed director of Boogie Nights, Magnolia and most recently, There Will Be Blood, (which earned him a Best Picture Oscar nod) is not one to shy away from difficult themes. There Will be Blood, for example, was an allegory about the cultural climate of the United States during the Bush years. No? Nobody else got that? You know - oil, religion, the brutal power struggle between both in the quest for profit? Well, our point is, he’s not afraid to make a statement when he needs to. This next movie, (due in US cinemas in October) is set in the 1950s, (L Ron Hubbard founded Scientology in 1952), stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a cult leader in a moustache and hairdo that looks eerily similar to L Ron Hubbard’s and appears, from the trailer, (below) to be making a very pointed comment about mind control – specifically regarding Joaquin Phoenix, the poor love.
We’re not alone in our suspicions –everybody is talking about this. Here’s what the Huffington Post had to say about it.
The Master is rumored to be a thinly veiled look at the life of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (for instance, both Hubbard and the fictional Dodd were married to women named Mary Sue). However, even that connection is up for debate.
But ...
"I don't know what you've heard and what script you've read," Philip Seymour Hoffman told Hollywood Elsewhere blogger Jeffrey Wells last year, "[but] trust me, it's not about Scientology."
Spoken like a true cult leader. Watch the trailer - and be saved! Seriously, it's quite good.
